One of our biggest challenges at cadjunkie has always been finding the time to make new content. Believe it or not, it takes a ton of work to manage a website with thousands of subscribers, especially if you're doing all of the web development internally.

NEWSFLASH: WE ARE NOT WEB DEVELOPERS.

We had a crazy idea. "What if," I stammered, swaying a bit after one too many apple-banana juice boxes at a late night brainstorming session, "what if we spent less time making websites, and more time making content for our websites!" Genius.

Hence the new cadjunkie. It's the same old content you know and love, packaged in a completely new, totally better, much, much, much, simpler and easier to use website.

No more memberships.

The biggest difference is that we're no longer a membership site. Whaza-wha? That's right. We are now 100% purchase based. Why? Let me count the reasons:

Membership sites are annoying to use. You sign up, and you're never quite sure if your'e still being billed or not. When is that next debit going to happen again? We did our best to be clear and forthright, but it's still just inherently confusing.

Membership sites are annoying to administer. If you think memberships are annoying for users, they're even more so behind the scenes. We were spending more time on customer service and bug fixes than on creating content. Yuck.

The value proposition is never really clear. Our intentions were good, but we found that with memberships it's hard to manage expectations. Some people expect lots of personal attention, and others expect lots of new content every month. Obviously we can only afford to devote so much time to each member, so how do we divvy that up fairly?

It's hard to entice new authors. We'd love to bring more voices into cadjunkie, teaching way more stuff than Adam could possibly do on his own. With memberships, we basically can't, because fair revenue sharing is pretty much impossible to calculate. With a purchase-based model, it's easy to give authors a cut of each purchase, making it a much easier sell to potential contributors.

A simpler way

From now on, all cadjunkie content is either completely free, or with a one-time transaction. With purchases, the proposition is clear: you pay for it, you download it, you own it. Peace be with you.

And fret ye not, paying members! Your support over the years has been crucial to keeping the lights on around here, and we're grateful. We've emailed a special offer to all of our existing users, and we think it's a really good deal for everybody. If you were a paying member of cadjunkie as of January of 2015 and you never received a note from us, get in touch. We want to make this right.